Thoughts on Software Engineering

My Talk at OpenFest2009 – Writing Open Source Books with Large Team of Authors

November 9, 2009

Yesterday I delivered a talk at OpenFest’2009 to share my rich experience in writing free open-source books with a large team authors and editors. Particuarly I presented the methodology, the organizational and management practices I applied during the work on my last successfull project of this kind: the open source book “Introduction to Programming with Java” written in less than 6 months by a team of 30 authors, consisting of 25 chapters and 962 pages. In the presentation and demonstrations I focused on the most important activities and practices that make such projects successfull:

Defining the scope of the book (list of chapters)

Creating a detailed guidelines for the authors specifying the writing style and practices

Defining the templates for each chapter (topic) containing its structure (headings, subheadings and TODOs)

Conducting the team meeting to assigning a chapter to each of the authors

Creating a project plan, assigning tasks and deadlines for each author and tracking the work progress

Managing the authors and working with authors missing their deadlines

Performing a review of the text

My presentation (in Bulgarian) and all demonstration real world examples are available for download: